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Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Guardian reports that the NSA monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another U.S. government department. According to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA encourages senior officials in its 'customer' departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their 'Rolodexes' so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems. The NSA memo dated October 2006 that was obtained by the Guardian suggests that such surveillance was not isolated, as the agency routinely monitors the phone numbers of world leaders – and even asks for the assistance of other U.S. officials to do so. However, the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced 'little reportable intelligence.' At the daily briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney again refused to answer repeated questions about whether the U.S. had spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's calls in the past."

The system was designed to scale just fine. What happened is that the system has been corrupted, and that corruption has been very thorough. Remember that the United States is supposed to separate powers and responsibilities. Three separate branches of Government with no ties to keep each other in check. Separate levels of Government with the same branch separations were supposed to keep the Federal level from becoming too powerful.

After a reset, we must remember what Socrates stated. In order for a Republic to succeed the members of the Republic must be highly educated, and that a Political class must be guarded against. People have been deprived of education in Philosophy and Rhetoric. Without those two things, it's very easy for a small group to manipulate them. It's happened over and over again through history, and we are no exception.

What is WRONG with you people? Every country is spying on every other (with some exceptions). It's part of Statecraft. The British are spying on the Americans, who are spying on the Germans, who are spying on the French, who are spying on the British, the Americans and the Germans, etc. etc.

Seriously funny that you people are all so pig ignorant about it and that this is somehow a surprise. Grow up.

Meh, that's like arguing "all countries have militaries and all have been in wars." OK, it's a true statement. But it overlooks awfully important differences in the size of those forces and how aggressively they use them, both internationally and against their own citizens.

Yeah I think this a lot. The US has a government, their job is to govern, and yet it's always news when the government governs in a way the people don't like. And here I am just like HELLO, they're a government: it's their job to govern things JEEZ.

Despite breaking the law, disregarding the constitution and making secret laws using a secret court which the people who they serve have no right to access? You may want to do a little more research on how the NSA is 'doing an effective job'

The real rarity in government is elected officials actually serving with an interest in the people.

An effective job would be getting human spies near leaders, press, mil and having total signals intelligence coverage too.
The US seems to have its crypto ENIGMA like 'win' but you can really only play that emerging telco/radio tech trick once.
What are the options?
The US totally fooled 35 nations signals intelligence teams 100% of the time for how many decades now?
Or the US was fed slight disinformation by 35 nations signals intelligence teams for many years.
Its rare for 35 other governments to be tha

Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government.

Guess what, the U.S has armed forces and their job is to blow stuff up. That does not mean that it's a good idea to have them blow up America's allies. I know everybody spies on everybody else but when you are treating your allies like enemies it's time to re-examine which is more important to you, your alliances or knowing what the president of France eats for breakfast or where the chancellor of Germany buys her strudel. As for doing their job, I fail to see how US intelligence can be said to be doing its job in view of their complete inability to keep a lid on their operations and keep in mind that we haven't even begun to take into account the miserable US intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war which must surely lead one to lower the competence rating of the US intelligence services still further.

"Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government."

You guys who say this have to realize that all of this belligerent surveillance winds up targeted squarely at the heads of American citizens at home. The security apparatus does have one quasi-legitimate problem with their current mission -- If the idea is to tap all of the world's communications all the time, on the Internet, packets are not tagged with geographic or political-state indicators. So the only solution, really, is to suck up every packet, American and non-American alike, which is what they are now doing.

With Internet packet switching, the only way for Americans to expect communication privacy rights is for everyone in the world to have communication privacy rights. Surveilling everyone means surveilling all Americans, all the time. Do you really want that?

Really? Why is it their job to spy on Angela Merkel, if Obama could just read the newspaper or call her up to find out what she's thinking? Nobody says the NSA shouldn't spy on North Korea, but how about the right balance? Shouldn't they spy on the military infrastructure of enemy countries rather than close allies and trade partners?

Anyway, the bright side of this news is that the cooling down of relations between the US and EU countries might result in less violations of constitutional rights of citizen

the image presented was spying on the Soviet Union, Soviet allies and neutral nations falling under Soviet influence. Add in keeping the codes safe and the US mil informed e.g. warning of a Tet Offensive.
For that they got quality funding and where able to attract the best staff per generation. Later it gets interesting with the CIA, private sector contractors and the domestic surveillance issues.

This is the NSA fufilling its role.. full stop. If you're not a US citizen and you're doing something of interests to our intelligence services you should be targeted.

If you're a citizen of an Echelon [wikipedia.org] country, you have no room to talk because your nation is a partner. (To be honest, I thought Echelon was Anglosphere only, but there's the Netherlands in the fray.. wow. )

And do not for a second act as though other nations don't do this. You can start with Frenchelon [wikipedia.org]. And to those who bleat about economic and

Echelon is 5 nations. Other countries e.g. Sweden's FRA helped. Germany's BND would give everything (all telco) within (~West) Germany to the NSA but knew it would never get anything back as a swap or deal that the Echelon nations enjoyed. Germany would be thanked in return via mil/signals projects.
Sweden and Switzerland had emerging commercial crypto exports and had to be contained too so gov deals where done.
Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, Libya, Kenya, Morocco, India and Pakistan all helped wit

Here in the US countries like France are heavily restricted from operating and managing US entities that have ties to US security and law enforcement operations. (Bio-metrics, AFIS, Facial Recognition, Crypto, Official Identity and Credential Solutions, etc.) Because they are foreign? No. Because they have been caught spying on the US.

The only different here is the US isn't flopping over and whining like a European Soccer player about a little spying.

Where are their spies? Its as if they just let their top political leaders stumble around the world stage as bait for the NSA. Congrats on the election win, here our tested 'safe' phone, fax machine. Use it a lot.
A vast pile of documents are then sent.
In some safe house an inner group of political leaders meet as another group of political suits 'act' on the world stage with their leaky phones.
Giving the NSA and US just what it wants/expects to hear?
All the same countries faced the same intercept threats from communists, fascism, their own press and political rivals yet show zero skill when using the US global telco networks?
Are all the signals intelligence staff of 35 nations really more loyal to the USA than their own leadership?
Or are we seeing 35 nations playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Quicksilver_(WWII) [wikipedia.org] with a US gov so entranced with its own intercept skills? With little to no human spies left for "reality" what is the US really gathering other than what 35 govs select to talk about on phones they know are junk.....

Snowden told us what the NSA's up to. I want to know what the rest of the clowns are doing. I hear the dulcet strains of Yakety Sax drifting down Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House, but bugger me with a cactus if I can figure out what they're doing in there.

As opposed to all other intelligence/counter-intelligence agencies in the world, who do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

I think the reason they got "little reportable intelligence" is because when you are in a position like that (president of a country, foreign dignitary, etc) , you at the very least _assume_ your allies will try to listen to your conversations.

At this level "reportable intelligence" conversations are not carried over public/listed phone lines, but

Do you understand what broken trust is?Do you understand that you will be the outcast bully because all you do is fling shit at your former friends and allies.Do you understand that nobody wants to play with you any more because you turned into a arrogant paranoid dick?Do you understand what do undo others... means?You lost all your morals and with it any claims to be of any value to the world.Stop excusing your paranoid behavior and rediscover your former values. It will be long way of humility to rebuild

Mr. Unimportant from the land of Do Not Disturb.... and that guy is hurt and offended.

***Kidding aside, I can't imagine anyone in these governments being actually surprised -- what I figure is that the corporations NOT on the "Multinational Stranglehold of Governments" team is the group that is saying; "Hey, maybe we lost those trade negotiations while someone was spying on Al Qaeda, they were really doing corporate espionage."

And then the SHOCK once the American public realizes; wow, our military and inte

I have a word for you, that word is "media". That is why it has been so easy to deceive people, and why I agree with FudRucker that it's not the people's fault. Journalists are supposed to be the biggest check against abuse. While politicians were being bought by a select few with too much money, the media was also being taken over by the same group, as was the eduction system.

If people are deprived of information and intentionally fed false information it should not be a surprise that they are misled.

I agree with you that mass media is hugely to blame but it is catch-22/chicken and the egg problem - if the politicians we voted for are willing to relax media laws, allow entertainment to be marketed as news, and worst of all not allow independent journalists to interview political candidates outside of marketing scripted election "rallies" - then we get what we voted for. Media just helps solidify power into the same old hands, only voting differently can ever hope to change that (discounting any type o

I don't see it as a chicken/egg problem. I see it as a select group of people planning very well to take over. The corruption in the US has been at every level simultaneously. It took a lot of logistics and planning to do so, but it's been effective.

The EU parliament voted to suspend SWIFT, commission will ignore them of course... but it will come up for renewal in 2015 and they need parliament then. A law with absolutely huge penalties (a percentage points of annual company revenue) on sharing data with foreign intelligence has been passed (slightly toothless at the moment due to safe harbour agreements, but at this point I doubt those agreements will last long).

Soo... there has been a vote to suspend Swift data sharing that will be ignored anyway + leave plenty of time to "sway" parliament vote by 2015 when it comes up for review. By then the people would have forgotten anyway and public outrage will be even more fringe than it already is.

You mention a toothless sharing data law (link?), but as we see from todays news there is nobody in goverment willing to enforce it [slashdot.org] - it takes a bunch of law students to even get some kind of acknowledgment of the problem.

No, this is pretty much normal spying. If you had a spy agency and didn't monitor other nations for strategic advantage, you'd wonder what the hell they were doing. I'm not saying it's unreasonable to be opposed, because moral objections are best objections, just that pretending it's bad spycraft is silly.

No, not really. Tradecraft refers to the individual skills and best practices used in actual espionage. I was trying to use a term referring to the overall national strategy and chose a distinct one on purpose.

The U.S. has treaties of some sort with essentially every nation on the planet, with the exception of those we pretend don't exist. You can't think of international diplomacy like high school, where you've got friends and you've got foes. All alliances between nations are ones of convenience, and not of any sort of emotional bond.

In fact, the U.S's "closest allies" are all nations we've waged war or proxy war against in the past: U.K., Canada, Germany, Japan. Realpolitik dominates international diplomac

The nukes weren't even the deadliest bombings by the U.S.against Japan in WWII, much less including the blitz or the bombing of dresden. The tools used don't alter the morality of killing in war. Tokyo was worse, Dresden was worse, London was worse, some parts of southern Italy may have been worse.

Really? So if your company SysAdmin is secretly spying on your email, it's the CEO's fault? Even though the SysAdmin is the one with the technical knowledge to both implement and hide the spying?Not saying that Obama is innocent, but not knowing doesn't make him incompetent. It might just mean that the NSA are good at covering up.

If you want to fault him for something, fault him stepping on those who blow the whistle on these sort of activities, instead of commending them like he should.

It's a clear case of plausible deniability. The NSA made sure Obama didn't know what they were up to so he wouldn't be obliged to either stop them or lie. That's what good underlings do. "Will no one rid me of this cursed priest?"

Yes. Yes, he is. He is a common citizen just like the rest of us, who has been temporarily granted the authority to help lead this country. He is, in the end, nothing more than the chief bureaucrat of this nation.

To presume anything else is a mistake. He is not a king. He is not a lord. When he leaves office, the country continues without him very well. He is a peon. That We-The-People have allowed this jumped-up-clerk (and that's t

For its part, the White House denied that the U.S. is listening in on Merkel's phone calls now.

"The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "The United States greatly values our close cooperation with Germany on a broad range of shared security challenges."

Translates as "We are not doing it at this precise instant" (as widely reported, it seems very likely they did so in the past - and, no doubt, will do so again in the future, if they think they won't get caught).

Look again at the language you're replying to. It says "will not", which is a clear promise not to do it again. Not a particularly believable promise, but more believable than if they outright lied by denying that it ever happened.

Sure there was. It has embarrased the Obama administration, and destroyed his credibility with American allies.

No, no, no, no and no.

This is all just a bunch of political bullshit people. There are a wide variety of world leaders being monitored by a wide variety of governments, and the politicians and world leaders are all perfectly aware of this fact.All these stories are, is various politicians jumping on various iterations of the NSA story for their own political purposes. They are playing off anti-US sentiment among their populaces to further their own agendas. Which is fine, that's how politics works, but stop

Not to worry, US reputation had been plummeting for a while before Obama took office.

Besides, I think most international observers will recognize that the US govt does not represent its people. Which is a shame, of course, but also means that US citizens have some credit left whereas their government does not.

What's freaking me out, though, is there doesn't seem to be a bottom -- rock or otherwise.

I am an American staying outside America, and in my personal experience, most of the world people (non-Ameicans) do not seem to separate the American government from the people of the United States of America.

In other words, the world at large treats what the American government did as if it was done by the citizens of America.

Well, I don't know where you are located, but in my limited surroundings (Netherlands) I think my statement is accurate.

it's changing all the time, of course. The US is a democratic republic so, as time goes on and administration after administration of both major parties get away with all kinds of wicked behaviour -- unpunished by the electorate -- maybe more and more outside observers may conclude that, well, maybe a majority of citizens do support this stuff after all.

I'd prefer it if they spied on countries that are actively hostile towards us, if they're going to spy at all. No, spying to collect evidence is not okay (or else spying on citizens would also be okay).

This apologist nonsense is not surprising, but it is an absolute eyesore.

Why did he EVER take a job with the NSA if he thought all forms of electronic intelligence were bad and worthy of spilling the details about to the whole world?

Because the CIA fired him for those very reasons. He's not a hero, he's just an attention whore like Assange. Both do things in the name of the moral high ground... yet utterly ignore the fact they do shit to harm all sorts of people.

I'd bet the only reason we heard about domestic spying FIRST from Snowden is because some newspaper reporter looking at the documents found them and wanted to run with it first, not because Snowden pointed it out. He's just another Bradley Manning, all pissed off he wasn't

America's first sport: shooting the messenger. With so much people asking for this I suppose that in american courts should be normal that witnesses are all sent to jail while criminals are getting paid and sent back to home.